here no one sleeps
by rushmore
Summary: What happens between Arthur and Mal, after "We're here to work" and before "Pain is real."


_Here no one sleeps, one lays up while the other lies down_

_Where no one sleeps, one lays up while the other lies down_

_Ask the line on your face what the line on your hand meant_

_We couldn't see what was coming_

- "Empty" by Metric

* * *

  
"What's _she _doing here?" Arthur asks.

_She _being Mal, staring out at the sea, standing right in front of him as if nothing had happened.

As if she hadn't jumped off a building.

Cobb tells him that he'll take care of it, and Arthur tells him, "See that you do," and walks away.

* * *

He'd met Mal first. Cobb had come after, when he'd passed the test. Mal was the test. If she trusted him, he would join the team.

"You're so young," she'd said.

"So are you," Arthur said, standing on the top of a skyscraper. "Why is it?"

Mal smiled. "Maybe it's that we're too young to know better."

"You speak English perfectly," he told her. He had read her file before the meeting, knew that she was French, raised in Paris by _the _Stephen Miles, _Mallorie, _unlucky, married to a man named Dom Cobb, and had a weakness for sunsets.

"You're a terrible flirt," was her reply, because she had read _his _file and discovered his weakness for all things French.

"Non, je ne regrette rien," Arthur said.

Mal laughed, and that was how Arthur joined the team.

* * *

Arthur knows Cobb better than anyone, maybe even better than Cobb does. He knows what Cobb refuses to know, that the Mal on the boardwalk is not Cobb's Mal. He adjusts his tie and watches the guards on the balcony of the third floor. It's almost despicable, really, how people don't care about appearance these days.

After two weeks of receiving letters from Mal, he was allowed to meet Cobb. The letters had informed him what to expect:

_Arthur-_

_I know you tend to tie your ties very tightly,_

_But it wouldn't hurt to leave your vest home now and again._

_Mal_

Mal had answered the door dressed in a loose white dress that fell to the floor.

"Come in," she said, smiling. "He's out back."

Cobb was not at all what he had been expecting. He was funny in a sly way, always looking for the right moment to throw the conversation off balance with a quick retort, but there was something else about him that made Arthur uneasy, something that he couldn't quite place.

On the way home, Arthur reflected that maybe it was the fact that he couldn't quite place something about Cobb that made him uneasy. His life relied on facts and files, everything laid out in a discreet folder, and Cobb didn't seem like the kind of person who would comply with Arthur's organizational skills.

* * *

"You can't imagine," Cobb whispers after she asks if the children miss her, and then he's out the window, telling her to stay where she is, that he's just getting some air.

Mal considers staying, but then she leaves; if he isn't going to tell her the truth, what is the point in waiting?

She watches the chair slide towards the window, and then she goes to find Arthur. After all, she isn't working with them anymore.

* * *

They had all been in their early 20s when they started stealing from people's dreams. Cobb, the oldest, was the most daring, pushing them forward to bigger and better things. Mal was only a couple of months older than Arthur, but she had married young, which made her seem older, and she was French, so.

Arthur ran away from his family when he was eighteen. He shaved off his hair, joined the Army, and met Eames. Then he'd met Mal, and then Cobb, and Eames hadn't met them, yet, because he was off somewhere in the world and couldn't be bothered to send a damn postcard.

* * *

Arthur has been keeping watch on the third floor for a while now, which should mean that Cobb is doing what he said he would ("I'll take care of the rest"), but he hasn't worked with Cobb for five years without learning that some things never change.

So after Arthur sees the guards move away, he decides to follow them. He knows where they are going; he knows the layout of the dream because he had memorized it the night before the job.

He's walking up the staircase to the fourth floor when Mal catches him.

"Arthur," she says, smiling, "He's out back," and Arthur is hit by the memories of Mal in a white dress and Cobb laughing and finally, finally finding a home again.

She is holding a gun to his forehead, right between his eyes.

"Call the guards," Arthur says. Maybe Cobb has gotten the envelope by now. _Yeah, and maybe you can don't wake up screaming every night, and maybe Eames is waiting for you back home._

"But what's the fun in that?" Mal blinks innocently at him, "Didn't I teach you anything?" and pushes him to the edge of the staircase.

"Paradox," Arthur whispers, looking down at the abyss, and the irony is that if he fell right now, he would wake up.

* * *

For as long as Arthur had known Eames, he had hated him.

He hated Eames from the moment he saw him, hated the paisley and tweed and direct opposition to the Army's rules, hated the fact that Eames had lent him his shirt after Arthur had bled through the one he was wearing.

He hated Eames for getting shot on the day that Arthur was leaving the Army, because Eames _would _do something like that, just to say, _See? See what you're leaving me with?_

He hated Eames for meeting Mal and Cobb after Arthur had already been working with them for a year, and he hated how easily Eames had fallen into working with them, how easy everything was for Eames, but that was a lie, because Arthur knew Eames like the scars on his back, so well that it hurt to think about it.

And most of all, Arthur hated Eames for making him love him, for making him love him when he had really loved Mal first.

* * *

Mal doesn't push Arthur off the staircase. "You'd probably survive," she told him.

"So shoot me."

"Arthur, I don't want to _kill _you," she smiles. "Just hurt you."

"Like you hurt Cobb?"

Mal stops smiling and hauls him up roughly, slamming him into the wall. "_He _has nothing to do with you."

Arthur remembers her saying those exact same words to him in another lifetime that felt like a dream. He remembers her saying, "He has nothing to do with you," after Eames had joined the team, because he had told Mal about what had happened in the Army. Mal was pregnant at the time, and all Arthur can really remember about it is way that Mal's face was lit, as if the sun had been following her for her whole life.

"Cobb has everything to do with me," Arthur says now, ignoring the dull ring in his skull from the way she slammed him against the wall. "What did you do to him, Mal?"

Mal raises her gun and points it at his heart, but then she remembers, and Arthur wonders what it must be like to be a shade, real and unreal all at once.

"How is Eames?" She asks, curling her lip. "Still not home?"

Arthur grabs his gun, and that's when the guards blast through the door to the stairs.

* * *

Arthur had only told Mal about what it had been like to carry Eames' bleeding body back to headquarters on the day that Arthur was due to be discharged from the Army.

"It was terrible," he'd said.

"He has nothing to do with you," she had told him, concern lining her face, "Not now, not on these jobs. Arthur, you have to realize that what Cobb and I have is dangerous. On every job, I worry that he's going to go into limbo, that I might have to live without him."

"Mal, God, I don't- Eames- I don't love Eames."

Mal had just whispered, "Oh, _Arthur,_" and touched his cheek, and that was when Arthur had realized that he had always loved her, just not in the way he thought he had.

* * *

Mal lets the guards drag him to Saito, and they find, to Mal's amusement, Cobb holding the envelope.

Arthur neither appreciates the irony nor the shot to his knee from Mal, but she does have good aim, which must count for something, and anyway, Mal had always insisted on saving him from the pain of watching buildings fall.

* * *

Author's Note:

God I love Inception. I don't think my brain will ever recover.


End file.
